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Comment by gcr | Hacker News Reader

If you don't want your face to be recognized, you can sometimes prevent it from being detected in the first place.

Our research group recently looked into how to hide from Facebook's face detector. If you're uploading photos, adding white bars around the eyes of the subjects in the photo is the best way to prevent Facebook from finding the face. However, if you're out and about in the real world, even scarves and masks aren't enough--facebook sometimes finds these occluded faces too. There aren't very many easy answers. https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04504

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Years ago, I read about a hat that some Hollywood stars had found useful for fighting paparazzi. Mind you, I don't recall the source, and it my have been tabloid nonsense.

The hat had a circle of IR LEDs (or something of the sort) emitting 360 degrees of invisible-to-the-naked-eye light. Photos of anyone wearing the hat had a similar effect to using a flash in a mirror, the subject was completely washed out by light.

Again, I'm not sure if this was bogus or not, but it seems the demand for such a product is only going to become greater. Hell, I'd buy one.

Does anyone with expertise in this area know if this type of device is technically possible? I'm voting no, otherwise we'd be seeing these devices everywhere, and there would be laws against wearing them.

It does appear to be an actual thing. [1] The idea also featured in the novel Influx.

[1] http://gizmodo.com/these-glasses-block-facial-recognition-te...

I had seen the exact same thing but sadly I have no more information on it. From what I saw it caused a wide glare issue around the area with the lights.

Not quite answering your question, but,

> .. Hollywood stars ..

It's obvious now: simply have makeup done up such that you look like someone else

Most cameras have an IR filter so that won't work.

In the past, phone cameras often didn't have an IR filter.

Near-red IR is hard to filter without also accidentally making red colors look off, because getting the frequency response perfectly match human eyes is extremely hard. You don't want to detect less, and detecting just a bit more usually won't hurt.

Maybe we can create a system that inserts imperceptible perturbations to generate adversarial images when uploading.

http://www.kdnuggets.com/2015/07/deep-learning-adversarial-e...

That only works until people start doing it. Then it retroactively stops working.

The only way to prevent your face from being recognized is by not having your face in a photo to begin with.

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